The Super Bowl may have tested the faith of Giants and Patriots fans this week, but it tested my ability to reread some of my favorite books about faith that I would have liked to write about this week. (How often does the home team play in the NFL championship when you live in New Jersey?) The books I might have gotten back to if the Giants had lost in the playoffs include two great novels, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for The Archbishop and Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, and the spiritual autobiography of the 20th century’s most famous Trappist, Thomas Merton’s The Seven-Storey Mountain. I hope to write more later in the year about these classics, all about clergy who face tests of faith. For now I’ll just note that Cather’s novel recently has appeared in a new Virago Modern Classics edition, which has an introduction by A.S. Byatt.